Chapter 7 #2
“Mr. Harrison is out buying provisions, Your Grace, else I should have consulted him,” Dove added.
“What the devil has Harrison to do with it?” Marchmont said. “Do you need him to tell you the matter is urgent? Was the maid’s anxiety for her mistress not plain enough? Send to the stables. I want a horse. Now.”
The Hyde Park Zoe discovered in the early morning was amazingly quiet and stunningly beautiful.
A faint mist hung over the place, making the leaves of the trees shimmer.
There was green, green, green as far as the eye could see, and the sheen of water in what her groom had told her was the Serpentine, a man-made river created in the time of King George II on the orders of his consort, Queen Caroline.
The view Zoe took in was easily worth the guilty conscience.
She’d lied to the grooms. Wearing her mother’s habit, she sat upon her mother’s saddle on her mother’s horse.
None of these articles, including the horse, fit her.
She could only hope that she didn’t end up as a tangled heap of broken bones.
Ahead of her at present stretched the King’s Private Road. This was the road known as Rotten Row, the groom explained. It was strictly for riding, he said. Only the reigning sovereign was permitted to drive along this particular road.
At this hour, Zoe knew she’d little chance of encountering any sovereigns driving to or from Kensington Palace. At the moment, she didn’t even see another rider.
But as she was taking in the acres and acres of glistening greenery, a slim, elegant rider on a superb gelding approached. The horse’s dark coat matched the lady’s hair. Her wine-colored habit was of the highest quality and latest fashion. Her groom’s livery was splendid.
This had to be Marchmont’s concubine.
Zoe felt the twinge again, but sharper, augmented by envy. The lady was breathtakingly elegant and utterly sure of herself. She didn’t need lessons in how to stand or sit or pour tea.
As she neared, Zoe touched her crop to her hat. She couldn’t remember whether it was proper to acknowledge a rider to whom one hadn’t been introduced. On the other hand, failing to do it might be construed as a snub.
Zoe didn’t want to snub this woman.
She wanted to kill her.
It was wrong and stupid to feel this way, of course, but she couldn’t help it. She was uncivilized.
To her surprise, the lady returned the salute. She didn’t pause to speak, though, but rode on.
Zoe let her pass, then followed, slowly at first. But as Lady Tarling’s horse picked up speed, Zoe encouraged hers to do the same.
Before long, Zoe was riding alongside the lady on the broad path.
Lady Tarling glanced her way, smiled, and raised her eyebrows in inquiry.
Zoe returned the smile and nodded. And so the race began.
By the time Marchmont found them it was too late to do anything. They were galloping headlong down the hill from a stand of trees. He dared not get in their way, lest he distract them and cause an accident.
In his mind an image flashed of Zoe, in the summer before she vanished, galloping ahead of him on a narrow bridle path. She’d bolted and taken a fractious mare for a mount—daring herself and everyone else, as she too often did—and he’d gone after her, his heart in his mouth.
When he caught her and scolded her, she told him he was stuffy. She complained of her French lessons and mimicked her French tutor’s efforts…until Marchmont was clutching his stomach, laughing helplessly.
In less than a twelvemonth she was gone, and all the brightness went out of his world.
Now he watched, heart pounding, until at last the two riders slowed and turned onto the road that would take them across the Serpentine. When they returned to Rotten Row they seemed to exchange words, but briefly. He made his way back to the Row and waited.
Lady Tarling rode ahead. When she reached him, he resisted the urge to shout at her for endangering Zoe. His mind knew—if his gut didn’t—that Zoe endangered herself.
He schooled his features and his voice and greeted the lady politely. She was flushed with the exercise, and her dark eyes were dancing.
“Ah, Duke, you have your hands full, I’ve heard—and now seen,” she said. She looked as though she would say more, but she only shook her head and laughed. Then she rode away.
Zoe dawdled, pretending to be enraptured by the view. She was probably catching her breath. Not on a horse in twelve years! She must be numb as well as exhausted.
He waited.
At last she trotted sedately to him. He would not be surprised if she pretended not to see him and trotted right past him, but she slowed and stopped.
“How beautiful it is,” she said. “Everywhere I look, there’s greenery. I cannot remember when last I saw so much green. In Egypt, you know—”
“Are you insane?” he broke in impatiently. “You haven’t ridden in twelve years. That gelding is too wide for you, and the saddle is too short. Yet you raced with a complete stranger on terrain you don’t know. I saw you gallop headlong down a hill. You could have been killed.”
She looked at him in the way most people looked at his aunt Sophronia when she made one of her dafter pronouncements.
“But of course I’ve ridden in recent years,” she said.
“Many times. Sometimes we traveled up the Nile on holiday or to abuse the peasants. Then the men would let me ride in the desert. Sometimes a camel, sometimes a donkey, and sometimes a horse. They knew I couldn’t run away then.
I tried, but it was no use. All the desert looks the same, and in no time I’d be lost. They had no trouble catching me, and it amused them. It was a game to them.”
She spoke of the Egyptian experience with less emotion than she’d employ to describe a pair of gloves or slippers. But he could see the scene too clearly and Zoe in it. The vision upset him, adding to the stew of fear and anger inside.
While he struggled to beat down emotion, she looked calmly about her.
“I like this place,” she said. “I did not realize it was so large.” Her gaze came back to him. “I must like her, too, though I find I’m very jealous.”
“I don’t care whether…” He paused, trying to think past the fear and rage he couldn’t quite command. “Jealous?”
“She’s so elegant,” Zoe said. “She knew who I was, I believe, but she did not snub me. That was generous. If I were your concubine, I would be very suspicious of protégées.”
“She is not my con—”
“Her seat is excellent. Better than mine.”
He would like to get his hands on the person who’d turned her mind to Lady Tarling. He ordered himself to be calm.
“Her saddle fits her,” he said. “Her mount fits her. She did not steal her mother’s—”
“No.” She held up her hand. “You will not scold me. This was fun. I want fun. I want a life. In Egypt I was a toy, a game. I was a pet in a cage. I vowed never to endure such an existence again.”
He stared at her in outraged disbelief.
He told himself her English sounded well enough but her grasp of meaning was less than perfect.
He told himself a great many sensible things, but his gut reacted to the accusation, the patently unfair accusation.
She was equating him with the swine who’d caged her and treated her like a pet and a game.
“I drove you all about London yesterday,” he said. “I took you to buy dresses and underthings and shoes and stockings. And I told you I would take you for a drive today.”
“I needed to ride.”
“You might have said so.”
“I didn’t know it then. And even if I had known it, you would not give me a chance to say what I wanted.
We’ll do this, you say. We’ll do that. I will collect you at two o’clock, Zoe.
I will make you respectable, Zoe, whether I like it or not, for your father’s sake, and because I said I would, and I always keep my word. ”
“I know the words are English,” he said, “but the thinking must be Arabic, because I cannot make heads or tails of it.”
She signaled her horse to walk on.
“Oh, no,” he said. “You will not utter cryptic remarks and dismiss me. I will not be dismissed.”
She ignored him.
He dismounted and stalked to her. He brought her horse to a halt.
“Get down,” he said.
“No,” she said.
“Coward,” he said.
Her blue eyes flashed.
“Go ahead, then,” he taunted. “Run away.”
Her eyes were blue murder but she let him help her dismount. Her bottom must be sore, and her legs would soon be aching painfully.
“You need to walk,” he said.
“No, I don’t!” She stamped her foot and winced. “I’m only a little stiff. I do not wish to walk with you.”
“I don’t care.”
“You care about nothing,” she said. “What about the horses? You cannot leave the horses in the middle of the bridle path.”
“Your groom will deal with the horses.”
“I am not going to walk with you,” she said. She tried to mount her horse.
He could have amused himself watching her try to climb into the sidesaddle unaided, but he wasn’t in the mood to be amused. He grasped her hand and dragged her away from the horse and started toward the Serpentine. “I think I’ll drown you,” he said.
She kicked him in the shins and ran.
The attack being the last thing Marchmont expected—though it should have been the first, he later realized—he was slow to react. Stiff-legged and tired though Zoe must be, she made surprising progress during that moment’s delay, and disappeared into a stand of trees.
It was sheer stubbornness propelling her, he told himself, and that wouldn’t take her far. She’d had almost no exercise in recent weeks, her muscles were tired—though she might not realize it yet—and she was dragging a train of heavy cloth.
The trouble was, she didn’t need to go far to get lost—or to trip over that accursed train and stumble and crack her skull against a tree trunk or fall into the Serpentine and drown.
“I shall drown her, I vow,” he muttered, and ran after her.